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Critics' Choice: New CD's

Some jazz groups can't escape their instrumentation. A quartet with piano, vibraphone, bass and drums must deal with the fact that it uses the same instruments as the Modern Jazz Quartet; it will have to define itself in relation to the band that got there first. The same goes for a band with trumpet, baritone saxophone, bass and drums: it has to orient itself either toward or away from Gerry Mulligan's original pianoless quartet, which he formed with Chet Baker in Los Angeles in 1952.

The trumpeter John McNeil has kept a fairly low profile as a bandleader over the last 30 years, but recently he has been making a highly likable series of let's-try-anything records with OmniTone. He uses his new album to imagine a possibility: What if a band with the same instruments as the Mulligan-Baker group played themes with boiled down, contrapuntal lines, in honor of the ones Mulligan wrote, but engaged the bass and drums much more? (Mulligan's quartet records were beautiful but rhythmically dry.) To put it another way, what if that general sound, with the same blend of timbres and the same respect for concise melody, was generally brought up to date, made more flexible, with a more interactive group? What would it sound like?

Any attempt to answer that depends on who the musicians are. Because the musicians with Mr. McNeil on "East Coast Cool" are Allan Chase on baritone saxophone, John Hebert on bass and Matt Wilson on drums, the music can remind you as much of Ornette Coleman's early-60's quartet -- another important pianoless band -- as Gerry Mulligan's early-50's one.

Mr. McNeil wants to unlock the neat, airy, compressed feeling of the Mulligan quartet; he wants to open it up to modern possibilities. And he wants the music at least half planted on the ground. (A full-on free-jazz homage to Gerry Mulligan, who really liked his structure and swing, would make no sense.) So the pieces on the album, all originals but two -- one of which is "Bernie's Tune," which the Mulligan band made famous -- tend to have either a proscribed tonal center or a strong, swinging rhythm. Where there is actual free jazz, it's just an interlude, put in for variety: "Wanwood," a good, original ballad, has a few of these circumscribed sections.

All the composing and arranging devices Mr. McNeil uses to discipline these pieces -- the sudden dropping out of one or more musicians, the changes in rhythm, the use of a 12-tone row -- give the music its character, but the wonder of the record is its breezy transparency. Mr. Wilson has a light, bouncing touch, which sounds like a result of a lot of listening to Billy Higgins; Mr. McNeil sprawls through long, Don Cherry-style improvisations -- weaving in and out of tonal harmony -- using a clear, dry, clarion upper register. And Mr. Chase, filling Mulligan's role, does the most to seal the record's connection to what inspired it: he plays with balance and authority, and keeps the temperature of his improvisations low. Mulligan fans shouldn't come to this wanting to hear what he would have done; it's a record that borrows its starting point, but comes to its own conclusions. BEN RATLIFF